Dr. Anthony Wells is a Visiting Senior Research Fel- low, Department of War Studies Center for Intelligence, King’s College, London, and the author of a new US Naval Institute Press book: A Tale of Two Navies: Geo- politics, Technology, and Strategy in the United States Navy and the Royal Navy, 1960-2015.
In 1972 I was appointed a Senior Lecturer and Tutor, as a newly promoted Lieutenant Commander, Royal Navy, at the Royal Naval College Greenwich. The then Editor of The Naval Review, the late Vice Admiral Sir Ian McGeoch, KCB, DSO, DSC, a distinguished World War two Royal Navy submarine veteran, published in 1973 two articles of mine in successive editions, entitled: Admirals Hall and Godfrey: Doyens of Naval Intelligence (Parts 1 & 2). It is my privilege forty-four years later to write a more detailed account of one of the greatest intelligence triumphs of British history for The Submarine Review that I touched on in those articles, namely the Zimmermann Telegram, whose 100th anniversary is now with us, January to March, 1917. Admiral Sir Reginald, Blinker, Hall, Royal Navy, was the architect of this most famous intelligence coup of all time.
First, some background on Blinker Hall (1870-1943). He was the son of the first Director of British Naval Intelligence (DNI), William Henry Hall, so intelligence was in his blood when he entered the Royal Navy in 1884. As a Captain, Blinker Hall was the DNI throughout World War One, and because of his huge successes he was promoted Rear Admiral in 1917, after the Zimmermann Telegram. Later he became Vice Admiral, 1922, and Admiral, 1926. Second, let us quickly review the relevant Naval Staff structure in 1914. The British Naval Intelligence Department (NID) was created in 1887, with mainly the defense of British imperial trade interests as a primary driver. In 1887 there were a mere ten staff officers with a budget of about five thousand pounds a year. Many in the Royal Navy leadership were against such a Staff, with senior officers such as Admiral Fisher disclaiming in no uncertain terms that a Staff would, “convert splendid sea officers into very indifferent clerks”.
When Hall became the DNI, and war was declared in August, 1914 he faced much intransigence characterized by a combination of prejudice and ignorance. Operational intelligence as we understand it today was primitive to nonexistent. Hall took one extraordinary step that was to revolutionize naval warfare and which, with the benefit of hindsight today, may seem obvious, but in 1914 was clouded in fog. Hall realized that exploitation of wireless telegraphy and its cryptographic underpinnings could be war winners, what modern parlance would characterize as technical game changers. Hall built wisely on the work of Sir Alfred Ewing, a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Cambridge, who was brought into the Admiralty as the Director of Naval Education and then created the first ever cipher team. Hall’s Room 40 became the heart and soul of naval intelligence in World War One, building on Ewing’s foundations, to create a cadre of first class cryptographers. Hall’s single biggest problem was interfacing with the Operations Division of the Admiralty where there was institutional bias against new and mainly civilian technical experts advising operators on key intelligence from wireless intercepts. The issue was clear to Hall: The operators did not wish to share their operational data with Room 40 civilian cryptographers and the latter were deprived of the key opportunity to both analyze and interpret cryptographic intelligence in light of current and planned British naval operations and, most of all, their German adversaries. This failure to make the wise use of such intelligence reached its nadir at Jutland, a subject that has been much underrated in understanding why Jutland was not the success that the Royal Navy wanted and the country expected.
However, between January and March, 1917, Blinker Hall achieved the most remarkable triumph, unimpeded by anyone in the Admiralty, the Foreign Office, or indeed within the Cabinet Office. What I am about to describe is quite extraordinary. One of my mentors as a young man, the late Captain Stephen Roskill (the official historian of the Royal Navy in World War Two), wrote in his fine book, Hankey: Man of Secrets, “Today, when the Foreign Office exerts a paramount influence over all intelligence activities, it may seem extraordinary that until about 1919 the DNI should have held virtually all the threads in his own hands, and should have decided on the time and manner of using the knowledge that he possessed.” (Volume 1, page 80). This sums up Blinker Hall perfectly. What Hall did was in essence quite simple: He acted with the greatest skill, acumen, and daring, and ignored all and everyone who may have been in his way in achieving what he considered his absolutely critical duty in supporting the vital national interests of the United Kingdom, against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Hall’s other key attribute was simple also: He was successful. Another mentor of mine from my days at Greenwich, introduced to me by my boss, Professor Bryan Ranft, was the great American Naval Historian, Arthur Marder. The latter wrote of Hall, after the Admiralty shake up of 1917 (heads rolling after the Jutland debacle): “Also kept on was Captain Reginald Hall, the DNI (promoted to Rear Admiral in April, 2017), considered by many as one of the few brains of the war, which, indeed, he was” (Arthur J. Marder: From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, Volume 4. page 61). As an aside, do read his masterpiece on the Royal Navy. All these years later his volumes have never been improved on by modern scholars.
So what did Hall get up to between January and March 1917 that will forever live in the annals of any intelligence organization worldwide? First, the overall political-military context in which Hall and his Room 40 team were operating. The Americans were not in the war in January, 1917. The Germans were planning on restarting unrestricted U-boat warfare from February 1, 1917 in an attempt to bring the British economy to its knees by attacking its most vital national interest, seaborne trade. This one fact could be the tipping point for the American President to convince his people to join the war on the Allied side, remembering that in the United States in 1917, anti-British sentiment ran high, with a volatile and outspoken Irish-American and German-American population. Second, on January 11, 1917, the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, presented an encoded telegram to the US Ambassador in Berlin, James W. Gerard, who agreed to transmit the telegram in its coded form. The American Embassy transmitted this telegram on January 16, 1917, five days later.
Why would the German Foreign Ministry be using the Ameri- can Embassy to send its messages, in this case (the Zimmermann Telegram) via Washington DC to the German Ambassador in Mexico City, Heinrich von Eckhardt? The British had cut the German transatlantic cable at the beginning of the war in 1914. The US was neutral in 1914 and permitted German limited use of its Europe to US transatlantic cable mainly because President Woodrow Wilson was encouraging peace talks and wanted to ensure that Berlin could talk with the US diplomatically. Zimmermann’s telegram was instructing the German Ambassador in Mexico City to inform the Mexican President, Carranza, that if the US entered the war against Germany then Germany would support Mexico financially in fighting a war against the US to regain territory lost to Mexico in the wars with the United States, a bombshell of enormous proportions if made aware to the US government and people.
Hall’s Room 40 was reading all the American traffic, (that ran via cable from the US embassy in Denmark), and including all German traffic, encrypted or otherwise, that was forwarded from the US Embassy in Berlin. The US cable went via the UK, and the intercept point was at a relay station at Porthcurno, near Land’s End. Hall’s civilian cryptographers Nigel de Grey and William Montgomery brilliantly decrypted the Zimmermann telegram the following day after interception by the British, January 17, 1917. Why was this so speedy and efficient? Hall and his team had also pulled off two critical earlier coups. Room 40 had captured secretly during the Mesopotamian campaign the German Diplomatic Cipher 13040 and, as a result of very good clandestine relations with the Russians, Hall obtained the critical German Naval Cipher 0075 (the 007 part will not be lost on readers). The Russians had obtained this from the German cruiser Magdeburg after it was wrecked. Hall had secretly nursed Russian relations.
The genius of Hall was what he did and did not do next. The Americans may well think that this was all a devious British plot to bring the United States into the war. The telegram was brutally explicit in two regards: On February 1, 1917, the Germans would resume unrestricted U-boat warfare, and a German-Mexican military alliance was proposed, with Germany as the funding source. Hall needed a cover story for his knowledge of the German codes and to avoid the Americans knowing that Room 40 was reading theirs and others mail, while at the same time convincing Woodrow Wilson and his government that the telegram was real, not a British forgery. Hall never once consulted anyone in the British Foreign Office or within the Admiralty Staff. He acted with his staff totally alone. He then decided on his Deception Plan. This was the real genius of this extraordinary brilliant work by Hall and his team. Hall knew one key fact: The German Embassy in Washington DC, once it received the telegram, would have to transmit it to the German Embassy in Mexico City. Hall knew that they used a commercial telegraph company. NID agents bribed a Mexican telegraph employee to yield the cipher, thereby enabling Hall to inform the Americans that this had come directly from the Mexican Telegraph company from Washington DC. Simple, but brilliant. Hall also, in parallel, took another quite remarkable action, by great timing, by doing nothing until the Germans announced unrestricted U-Boat warfare on February 1, 1917, after which the US broke off diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3, 1917. Hall then did two key things. He only informed the British Foreign Secretary on February 5, 1917 with an emphatic request that the British Foreign Office delay all diplomatic moves with the US until Hall himself took various actions.
With Foreign Office knowledge Hall then met with the Secre- tary of the US Embassy in London, Edward Bell, on February 19, 1917, and the following day Hall met with the US Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Walter Hines Page, and handed him the telegram. Three days later Ambassador Page met with the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, and on Hall’s quite emphatic advice he gave the American Ambassador a copy of the stolen
Mexican cipher text and the English translation of the full Zimmermann telegram. After some analysis and discussion in Washington President Wilson was convinced. He went ahead and released the telegram to the US press on February 28, 1917, and this immediately inflamed American public opinion against both Germany and Mexico. Wilson and his top aids realized also that they had to protect the British Mexican Cipher and British code breaking capabilities.
Further positive news for Hall and his Room 40 team was that the Mexican President had been advised that German funding was unreliable, and that a successful war with the United States was unlikely. President Venustiano Carranza was also advised that even if German funding did materialize their sister South American nations, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, from whom Mexico would purchase arms, would likely be unsupportive of a Mexican alliance with Germany and a war with the United States. Nonetheless the Mexican government did not enforce an embargo against Germany, much to the chagrin of the United States, and Mexico continued to do business with Germany throughout World War One. However, Mexico did not repeat history in World War Two, declaring war on the Axis Powers on May 22, 1942.
The final coup de grace was delivered by none other than Arthur Zimmermann himself, who rashly announced on March 3, 1917, in a press conference, that the telegram was in fact true. He then very naively followed this with a statement in the Reichstag on March 29, 1917 that his plan had been for Germany to fund Mexico only if the Americans declared war on Germany. The United States Congress declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, President Wilson having asked for this Declaration on April 2, 1917.
Hall and his Room 40 team had triumphed and Hall was promoted to Rear Admiral shortly thereafter. What does all this tell us for today in an era when political control of intelligence is intense, resulting from decades of experience and restructuring, since the heyday of Blinker Hall, John Godfrey, Bletchley Park, and the American ONI and OSS? The politics of intelligence have been intense since Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt
created the Special Relationship during World War Two. Are we any better off today in terms of the vital national security interests of the UK and the US than during World War Two? There are as many interpretations of this issue as there are intelligence specialists and their political overseers. One domain that in the opinion of your author is both germane and neglected is the ethics of intelligence, the body or code of behavior that should guide and direct intelligence and the government customers that they serve. Intelligence is about reliable information delivered in a timely manner that helps decision makers in ways that will lead to successful outcomes. To have a well thought through and agreed professionally constructed code of ethics may be a key for avoiding future controversy and dilemmas after furors following events such as the Snowden revelations and betrayals.
Admiral Hall was a great admiral, a patriot of enormous proportions, and a consummate intelligence professional. He acted independently with a hugely trusted and a highly capable staff that was loyal, competent, and secure. Does Blinker Hall remain our man in the modern era? Perhaps we can all still learn a lot from Admiral Sir Reginald “Blinker” Hall?
Further Reading: The original classic on the Zimmermann telegram was written by the American historian and author Barbara Tuchman, who won the Pulitzer Prize twice: The Zimmermann Telegram. New York. Viking Press. 1958. A further classic is by another American, David Kahn: The Codebreakers. Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 1966. For a detailed study of British naval intelligence that includes Admiral Sir Reginald Hall’s tenure as the Director of British Naval Intelligence during the Great War, and also the detailed intelligence background and specific cryptological matters that pertain to the Battle of Jutland read my: Studies in British Naval Intelligence, 1880-1945. Anthony R. Wells. University of London. 1972. This may be accessed without charge by entering the title on the worldwide web and either reading directly or downloading.
